With the Odyssey changes, it seems like its role is a bit confused. Is it meant for assault or support now? If it supposed to be primarily a brawler with minor fighter support, then it either needs its 0.8 shield back or its flux raised. Its newfound speed does not amount to much when it is still forced to approach enemies to attack and take hits on the shield along the way in. If it is meant to hang back and provide support with beams and fighters, I think changing system from High Engine Focus to Reserve Deployment would help more because two wings of fighters will be chewed up in heavy fighting and drained to 30-40% even with fighter bonuses (from Expanded Deck Crew and skills), and Reserve Deployment will help slow down the rate drain. Either way, +5 OP to help support deck #2 would be nice. (A fighter bay is a weapon slot, is it not?) With its current OP, I need to sacrifice either vents or missiles, and since missiles tend to be unreliable, I leave missile mount empty every time so that my Odyssey can vent fast enough.

One more quick comment: Thumper is actually useful now! With 700 range, it can be mounted along with Arbalest and/or Heavy Mortar and help kill things, and Thumper will wreck things stripped of armor fast. On Enforcer, I now consider mounting all three among Arbalest, Heavy Mortar, and Thumper instead of two Arbalests and one Heavy Mortar.

Remove slowdown effect from hyper storms. It'll still cost you a bit if you bulldoze through one, but not excessive amounts, and the primary direct source of the annoyance is removed.

How about the other way around? Losing CR is punishing the poor players and barely bothering the well-equipped ones. Slowdown without CR penalty would still be relevant to travel, as hyperspace storms were meant to be.

I just tried out storms just to see what the fuss is, and it is well-deserved. Without Navigation, fleet is slowed to a crawl. E-Burn should ignore it, but doing so drops your speed drop to zero for a second before fleet starts moving, and by then, it seems E-Burn was more of a waste. With Navigation 3, the storms do not slow enough to make E-Burn worth using at all. Fleet burn drops to 9, activate E-Burn, speed drops low for a second, then I move at 11. Using E-Burn while S-Burn is on while caught in a storm seems like a very raw deal.

Storms are very bad now. Looks like I may reload games much more frequently as during the 0.7x days if storms turn out to be a real problem as I replay the game.

And the worst of it is, the people saying "Oh, you can just skill point your way out of storms mattering" back in .8 were either lying or just shooting themselves in the foot without realizing it; sure, with navigation 3 you could mostly negate the speed penalties... but even with safety procedures 2, simply clipping a storm cost a huge chunk of supplies - I tested the 'just fly in a straight line' technique, and it was simply too expensive to be practical unless you're spending half your cargo space on supplies and have credits coming out your ears to pay for it all.

Plus, that's five to ten skill points (depending on how you count aptitude costs) that you could've spent elsewhere, all going into "Hyperspace storms are less of a problem" - that kind of investment really should have an effect!

And the worst of it is, the people saying "Oh, you can just skill point your way out of storms mattering" back in .8 were either lying or just shooting themselves in the foot without realizing it; sure, with navigation 3 you could mostly negate the speed penalties... but even with safety procedures 2, simply clipping a storm cost a huge chunk of supplies - I tested the 'just fly in a straight line' technique, and it was simply too expensive to be practical unless you're spending half your cargo space on supplies and have credits coming out your ears to pay for it all.

Plus, that's five to ten skill points (depending on how you count aptitude costs) that you could've spent elsewhere, all going into "Hyperspace storms are less of a problem" - that kind of investment really should have an effect!

Uh, no? In .8 Nav 3 made you pass single storm cells within a second or so, costing hardly any supplies. You only had to dodge big clusters.

EDIT: Would it be really necessary for you to not only made the storms interrupt SB

(... storms don't interrupt SB.)

In any case: looks like I'll be hotfixing another (more minor) crash bug, so I'll take a look at a couple of things here. In particular, "maintaining contact" fleets using IP is not intentional and never happened to me in testing, and that's easy enough to fix.

Re: storms, I think I'll turn them back down a bit in frequency. Thinking about them some more, I think they'd work better if they were a much more rare and much bigger threat, rather than "constant, low-grade threat that can become an annoyance due to being constant" as they are now. So, for example, if now and again you were to find yourself in the path of a storm 10 cells wide, or some such, that's got potential to be an interesting event. The same sort of idea as behind turning down the probability of derelict defenders down to 50% but increasing their strength.

But that's much more than I'd want to even attempt for a hotfix, so I'll just turn the storm frequency back down a bit for the time being, while leaving the other changes in place.

I will say that I also don't get much of the fuss about storms - easy enough to avoid, for me, and they were never any real trouble, plus it's fun navigating clear channels in hyperspace for once - but turning down the storm frequency will leave that in place, so it's not something I feel strongly about one way or another.

Uh, no? In .8 Nav 3 made you pass single storm cells within a second or so, costing hardly any supplies.

Uh, yes. Really, I tried this. With the fleet I was using, that "hardly any" ran to about thirty supplies (with a fleet that could happily run for months on a mere 200 or so), and clipping multiple storms over the course of a trip (which inevitably happened if you did what people were suggesting and just went afk while your fleet flew in straight lines) meant -enormous- losses of supplies compared to actually controlling your fleet.

But then, it sounds like we're talking about different things - having to "dodge big clusters" still means you're interacting with the game, which was kindof the point of the storms in the first place.

And the worst of it is, the people saying "Oh, you can just skill point your way out of storms mattering" back in .8 were either lying or just shooting themselves in the foot without realizing it; sure, with navigation 3 you could mostly negate the speed penalties... but even with safety procedures 2, simply clipping a storm cost a huge chunk of supplies - I tested the 'just fly in a straight line' technique, and it was simply too expensive to be practical unless you're spending half your cargo space on supplies and have credits coming out your ears to pay for it all.

Plus, that's five to ten skill points (depending on how you count aptitude costs) that you could've spent elsewhere, all going into "Hyperspace storms are less of a problem" - that kind of investment really should have an effect!

Skill point out of way of storms is a heavy cost. I cannot afford to spend points in Navigation if I want a chance to get all 42 points into most of the things I want to make my fleet a combat machine. 42 points does not seem like enough, I am always juggling what one or two skills I want to sacrifice, nevermind QoL skills of any sort (aside from Fleet Logistics).

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Is it? I don't really get the fuss about storms. Yeah, they are dangerous. That's why you don't fly into them. That requires planning ahead an toggling sustained burn occasionally.

Sure, if they can be easily avoided. I only flew through them to see what they did. I have not played 0.8.1 enough to see how common they are. It seems many of the complaints boil down to how common they are and how devastating they are if you get caught in one. And remember, detection is still imperfect, and some people have difficult spotting them before they flare.

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When they were relatively harmless people complained that travel is boring because there are no challenges. Now there are challenges (apparently avoidance isn't too easy), but that's bad, too?

I missed or ignored those complaints about boring travel, probably because I did not agree with them. I disliked storms in 0.7x, and rejoiced when they were mostly irrelevant in 0.8. Now, after seeing how storms may be back with a vengeance in 0.8.1, if I encounter wall-to-wall storms frequently, I will probably reload games about as much as in 0.7x.

Uh, yes. Really, I tried this. With the fleet I was using, that "hardly any" ran to about thirty supplies (with a fleet that could happily run for months on a mere 200 or so), and clipping multiple storms over the course of a trip (which inevitably happened if you did what people were suggesting and just went afk while your fleet flew in straight lines) meant -enormous- losses of supplies compared to actually controlling your fleet.

Sorry for coming of a bit stroppy there.

I just tried it, my medium sized fleet (1 cruiser, 4 destroyer, 3 frigs) spend seven supplies to restore the CR they lost (1%) by passing through a storm cell. That's less than 1% of their cargo capacity.

But then, it sounds like we're talking about different things - having to "dodge big clusters" still means you're interacting with the game, which was kindof the point of the storms in the first place.

The big clusters are relatively rare, 97% of the time you don't have to (had to) do anything. And even if you ignored them, they hurt, but you could take the loss with some over-preparation.

Getting a false positive with Avast on the install file, both downloading it and running it. Claims it's an infection of FileRepMalware type. I've submitted a report to Avast about it, but thought I'd better let you guys know, too.

EDIT: Hm. Restored it and added it to exclusions, and then it claimed it blocked a threat just before the attack, of type IDP.Generic.23bb8a4a68f4.3.2

Maybe I've got a bad add-on on my browser or something, caused me to download something along with the installer?